This Sunday night at the Academy Awards, Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal’s Zero Dark Thirty appears poised to lose the Best Picture race to Ben Affleck and Chris Terrio’s Argo, and as much as awards shows ever actually matter, it’ll be a shame.

Although you could argue that Lincoln‘s saga of a divided nation’s pragmatic political maneuvering and morally murky compromise have some contemporary resonance, Zero Dark Thirty is truly the film of our moment. Bigelow and Boal have captured the clumsy ruthlessness and moral confusion of post-9/11 America with such precision that it is uncomfortable and frightening to watch. Many cultural critics have been so discomfited by the depiction of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program that they have tarred the film with a “pro-torture” label and likely torpedoed any chances the film had of taking home Oscar gold.

The torture debate has distracted from the film’s deeper, more complex qualities, and what’s worse, it’s been argued poorly from both sides. On the one hand, you have normally perceptive writers like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi embarrassingly misreading the film as a didactic piece of pro-torture propaganda, while the film’s defenders argue back that Zero Dark Thirty cannot possibly be pro-torture because it portrays the act as ugly.

But the squeamish rejection of the film as “pro-torture” has nothing to do with whether the film glamorizes torture or makes it look heroic. Rather, the question is whether Zero Dark Thirty endorses the efficacy of torture — does it say that torture works? Greenwald and those who agree with him would say yes, although that is not a response to anything that happens in the film. Rather, it interprets the absence of any clear statement against the effectiveness oftorture as an endorsement of torture by omission. But Zero Dark Thirty is working on a far more complex level, and one that manages to damn both torture and the cynically pragmatic argument against it in one fell blow.

The argument cannot be that we should not torture because it does not work. The argument must be that we should not torture because it is wrong.

Many progressives in this country have hinged their anti-torture argument on the fact that torture is a hugelyunreliablemeans of obtaining information. But Zero Dark Thirty shows us how the argument of effectiveness fails both politically and morally. Politically, because no matter how much evidence is gathered to the contrary, deep in our collective subconscious we will always believe that torture works, because almost all of us believe that if we were tortured, we’d give up the goods in seconds. It is an illogical belief, but one that we will never shake, and so the effort to abolish torture on the grounds of efficacy is undercut forever by the little voice in the back of our minds that says “Yes, but….”

More importantly, any argument about torture’s effectiveness fails morally because it concedes the moral component of the argument right off the bat. The argument cannot be that we should not torture because it does not work. The argument must be that we should not torture because it is wrong.

Zero Dark Thirty makes no clear statement about the effectiveness of torture; it works in the sense that it provides information, but that information later proves to be either redundant or misleading. By remaining ambiguous about torture’s efficacy, the film removes the issue from the argument. We are then left only with the unambiguous ugliness of torture, and it is on those grounds that the film invites us to pass judgment. Those who claim this as an endorsement of torture misunderstand that great films do not proffer statements, but rather ask frightening questions and demand that we answer them ourselves.

Torture is only a small piece of the film, however, and we do it a disservice to reduce it, as so many critics have, to its stance on that single issue. Zero Dark Thirty‘s major concern is its protagonist, Maya; specifically, it is looking at Maya, and in having Maya be looked at, as a woman against the male-dominated backdrop of espionage and terrorism. The film foregrounds the issue of gender relatively early, in a conversation between Maya and Jessica, played by Jennifer Ehle. Jessica pushes Maya to let her hair down, and wants to talk about sex and relationships. Maya dismisses the topic with a memorable line: “I’m not that girl that fucks.”

Maya’s denial of her own sexuality could be taken a few different ways — as empowering or disempowering, as personal choice or imposed expectation — but all of them point to a connection between this denial and her relentless forward momentum through a plot that devours or changes her fellows: Dan the torturer (Jason Clarke) flees back to civilization, Joseph Bradley (Kyle Chandler) is felled by politics, and Jessica is blown up by a suicide bomber. That Jessica is killed after we see her almost literally baking a cake (and, in the spirit of good hostessing, waiving security checks that might have saved her life) shouldn’t be taken as a indictment against femininity per se, but it certainly pushes the issue even further to the foreground.

Photo: Sony/Columbia PicturesMaya’s perceived usefulness to those around her often revolves on her gender. In an early scene, Dan uses her presence to sexually humiliate a detainee; in a later scene, in which evidence is being presented to James Gandolfini as the nameless director of the C.I.A., Maya — the only woman present — is told to stand in the back of the room, apart from the group. Her struggle throughout the film is primarily to be heard, to be listened to, and to have her superior knowledge and understanding taken seriously.

It is hard not to read Maya as at least a partial stand-in for Bigelow herself, a woman who has spent decades toiling in her chosen male-dominated field, and who has only recently been recognized for an intellect and ability that few of the men around her can match. Beyond that easy parallel, though, Maya’s struggle is really one against a system that dictates what we pay attention to — or, put more cinematically, a system that dictates how we see. Maya exists in a world where she is looked at but not seen, or not seen in the way in which she wants to be seen.

The scenes between Chastain and Gandolfini bring the gendered aspect of this system into the sharpest focus. The CIA director’s dismissive attitude towards Maya’s intelligence — “We’re all smart.” — suggests that, as a woman, she has to be smarter and better than the male agents surrounding her to deserve being heard. In the following scene, he feels the need to remind her that the CIA recruited her straight out of high school.

This tiny bit of exposition does a tremendous amount of work, giving us fresh insight into Maya’s character as someone who has been working on tracking bin Laden since the advent of adulthood, suggesting the predatory nature of the military-industrial complex on the best and brightest of our youth (and planting the chilling realization that matters of both our nation’s security and its very ethical structure are placed in the hands of uniformed citizens barely old enough to drink).

Between the CIA director and Maya this line of dialogue is double-edged. It is an acknowledgment that, yes, Maya is actually that much smarter than those around her, and so her words deserve to be heard (under the requirements he set in the previous scene); but it is also an assertion of authority and paternal dominance, a reminder to Maya that while she may be precocious, she was brought in as a child, and remains a child to the system. Gandolfini’s scene is the heaving sigh of a transmission caught between gears; by giving her the green light for the black op, he is reluctantly reversing the inertia that has seen Maya ignored, sidelined, and lectured to. Now, she gets what she wants. But what is that, exactly?

Maya is a kind of new feminist icon, an avatar for the women of today who are tough, smart, and successful, but who balk at actually calling themselves the f-word. Feminism has always been about more than putting women in the roles of men in the same old game; it has been about questioning the very rules of the game, how we come to decide what is male, what is female, and what either of them should do. And for a modern woman succeeding in a “man’s world,” questioning the structures and values of that world can be suddenly daunting, as it calls into question the very success she enjoys.

Photo: Sony/Columbia PicturesMaya has fought her way into the corridors of power — real power, over the life and death and freedom of others — but in doing so thoroughly adopted the values of that power. In her struggles to overcome the direct sexist hurdles of the system, she has ignored the deeper, darker, more disturbing aspects of that system. She tortures, she directs violence, she works her entire adult life towards the assassination of a single human being. Maya is a woman who has succeeded by embodying a destructive single-mindedness to which she has sacrificed not only her own sexuality, but any alliance with a feminine worldview – or a worldview that questions the masculine status quo. Her intelligence and perseverance are thrilling, and her strength is worth celebrating. But the context in which she has gained this strength gives us pause.

The strangest and most ambiguous moment in the film is the ending. Maya, sitting in a cavernous military plane, crying. Is this simply the release of tension the film has been building towards? Are these tears the emotions that she suppressed to get the job done? Is she relieved? Elated? Sad at her absence of purpose now that she has, in essence, completed her life’s work? Or is there a larger realization of sorts occurring here, if not for Maya, then for us?

Consider the climax of the film’s main action: Bin Laden shot practically off-camera, his face obscured. The purported focus of the film is treated as almost a collateral event. The soldiers who have killed him acknowledge his death as a practical matter of business, and then (as critic Ignaity Vishnevetsky has noted) show far more zeal and energy in capturing the files and hard drives found in the terrorist’s compound. When the team returns with Bin Laden’s body, it sits off to the side, all attention focused on the newly gathered information, the currency of a system of espionage and modern warfare. An icon has been felled, and his death will be celebrated, but in a practical sense nothing has really changed; the war of information continues.

When Maya sits in the empty plane, alone in the belly of the military-industrial complex, perhaps her tears are meant to mark for us the futility of grand action and momentous achievement within a system that will persist and self-perpetuate regardless of events and regardless of ethics. It is in this plane that it is finally established that “Maya” is her only name, a recognition that this fictional agent has no true identity outside this simulacrum of history. “You must be pretty important,” the pilot says. Her tears remind us how very much she is not.